Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature

The sketches themselves, however, seem at first to have been unaffected by these financial strains. Their author has plenty of leisure at his disposal: he merely makes casual observations as he goes out for a "stroll" or "saunter[s] moodily" down the street.(19) The author admits: "We have the most extraordinary partiality for lounging about the streets. Whenever we have an hour or two to spare, there is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy." The structure of each piece is apparently dictated by the aimless peregrinations of the narrator. "We were walking leisurely down the Old Bailey ... [and] we could not help stopping and observing [an old woman and her son]" one story begins.(20)

Dickens repeatedly emphasizes the accidental origin that is a defining feature of the "picturesque" scene. "We will endeavour to sketch the bar of a large gin-shop ... on the chance of finding one well-suited to our purpose, we will make for Drury Lane."(21) He creates a sense of spontaneity and immediacy by inviting the reader to accompany him on his travels. Like the visual sketch, the literary sketch relies on an apparent absence of intentionality to validate its disinterested truthfulness. The artist has not composed the scene; he has merely stumbled upon it. Dickens's contemporaries clearly accepted his portrayal of himself as a spectator and recorder of the scenes he describes: he was praised not for his inventive descriptions but for his "great powers of observation," and called "an acute observer," "a good observer," and "a close and accurate observer."(22)

Dickens is often considered a particularly "visual" writer because he delineates character through appearance and gesture. Whereas George Eliot, for example, stresses the possible discrepancy between a person's appearance and his or her inner self, Dickens usually makes his characters' outward appearance in some way emblematic of their true personalities. But while Dickens's novel characters strike some readers as static for this reason, the characters who appear in his sketches are often given life by his sequential depictions of their changed selves. Because the sketch form did not allow for elaborate plots, he embedded narratives in the brief tableaux he presented. Even though his sketches describe isolated moments in time, Dickens made each moment representative of a larger story, much as nineteenth-century artists like William Holman Hunt and Augustus Egg painted "genre" pictures that used emblematic moments to sketch in a whole history.(23) John Reed has suggested that while the "primarily descriptive" nature of Dickens's sketches does not lead one to "expect a great deal of moral weight," many of them in fact make powerful statements about sin and punishment.(24) This is partly a result of Dickens's insistence on imagining the consequences of the events he witnesses, the future lives of the people he describes. In this sense, his verbal sketches have an anticipatory quality like that of the visual sketch. They attempt to give a brief impression of how the completed picture might look.